It’s good that Brazil is taking to the streets

• Policy: US removes Alexandre de Moraes and his wife from Magnitsky sanctions list

There is therefore reason to arouse growing civic anger at the moral, ethical and political rot of Casa do Povo. But outrage without action only serves to soothe the conscience of the outraged: it frees them from the obligation to analyze how we reached this level of rottenness. Taking to the streets holding up a “Congress Enemy of the People” sign is easy, but almost suicidal – the equivalent of the right-wing “STF Enemy of the People.” It is much more effective to take to the streets to nominate those we deem unworthy of the vote received and ensure that they are not re-elected.

• Operation: The actions of the former Lira advisor to hijack the amendments were detailed by parliamentarians

In any case, the strength of the masses can be contagious. Depending on its authenticity, its dynamism and its representativeness, it can move undecided voters, overwhelm the media, surprise opinion polls and upset those in power. This happens in regimes of (still) democratic institutions. For oppressive regimes, the conversation is different. No totalitarian power is maintained solely by coercion, but by the conformism of a large part of the population acting as if they believed in the official ideology.

A published essay by the playwright, poet and later statesman Václav Havel, a native of the former communist Czechoslovakia, provides a lesson. The 1978 text, entitled “The Power of the Powerless,” analyzes the post-totalitarian system in Eastern Europe. In it, the author argues, even those who seem powerless in the face of oppressive regimes have power – not physical strength or political power, but the ability to “live in reality.”

Unlike the heroic dissidents idealized by History, Havel chooses for his metaphor a vulgar vegetable seller whose moral clarity and refusal to continue the daily farce manages to disrupt the current order. One morning, the greengrocer simply forgets to display the official poster that he always automatically places on the door of the grocery store:

— Workers of the world, unite.

Not by insult. He just realized that he didn’t believe in this slogan, so he decided to delete it. Just to please himself, acquiring in the act a latent power born from the refusal to participate in an institutionalized lie.

The now dissident greengrocer no longer votes in elections that he knows are a farce and begins to speak his mind. He rejects ritual, breaks the rules of the game and destroys the world of appearances, the fundamental pillar of the system. He will be dismissed from his position as a vegetable seller and exiled to the warehouse. The salary will be reduced, the dream of a vacation in Bulgaria will evaporate and the children’s higher education will be canceled. But it will give your little freedom a concrete meaning: the attempt to live in truth and to allow others to look behind the curtain of appearances.

There is no shortage of reservations about the practical applicability of the concept of moral resistance in contexts where direct confrontation and the search for structural change are essential. Focusing on individual dissent and the language of truth seems naive, insufficient and moralistic. Furthermore, the idea that institutionalized lying is only maintained by general conformity also fails to account for the complexity of power relations. But it is worth remembering that it was with such ideas that the dissident Havel became president, first of Czechoslovakia and, after the division of this already democratized country, of the Czech Republic, for two terms.

Citizens have countless ways to defend their democracy. Between 1900 and 2006 alone, American researchers Erica Chenoweth and Maria Stephan analyzed 323 successful democratic resistance movements around the world. Hence the persistent question surrounding the United States on the eve of its 250 years of independence: why has no resistance movement emerged against the systematic erosion of American institutions undertaken by Donald Trump during his second term? This “miasma of passivity,” as David Brooks wrote in The Atlantic magazine, is frightening.